MAXINE
On the night of the day upon which Berselius had paid his visit to M.
Cambon, Adams, seated in the smoking room at a writing table before a
broad sheet of white paper covered with words, suddenly took the paper,
tore it up, and threw the pieces in a wastepaper-basket.
He had been trying to put in language the story of the Congo as it had
been revealed to him.
It was all there in his mind like a tremendous dramatic poem: the great
sunlit spaces of the elephant country watched over by the vultures, the
eternal and illimitable forests old as Memnon, young as Spring, unwithered
and unbroken by the suns and rains and storms of the ages; the river
flooding to the sea, and the people to whom this place belonged, and the
story of their misery and despair.
When he contrasted what he had written with what was in his mind, he
recognized the hopelessness of his attempt. He had not the power to put on
paper more than the shadow of what he had seen and of what he knew.
To represent that people under the heel of that Fate was a task for an
Æschylus.
Sitting thus before the picture he could not reproduce, there rose before
his mind another picture he had seen that day. It was a large photograph
of the Laocoon. He had seen it in Brentano's window, and, now, with the
eye of memory, he was looking at it again.
That wonderful work of art washed up to us by the ages, that epic in
marble, expressed all that words refused to say: the father and the
children in the toils of Fate; the hand upholding for a moment the
crushing coil of the serpent, the face raised to a sky devoid of God or
pity; the agony, the sweat and the cruelty, all were there; and as Adams
gazed, the python-like lianas of the forest became alive in his mind, the
snake-like rubber vine twined in coils, circling about and crushing a
nation and its children, remote from help and from God, as Laocoon and his
sons.
Ages have passed since the sculptor of that marble laid down his chisel
and gazed at his completed work. Little dreamt he that thousands of years
later it would stand as a parable, representing civilization in the form
of the python which he had carved with such loathing yet such loving
care.
Adams, in the grasp of this startling thought, was recalled from reverie
by a sound behind him.
Someone had entered the room. It was Maxine Berselius.
They had seen very little of each other since his return. Adams, indeed,
had purposely avoided her as much as it is possible for one person to
avoid another when both are dwelling in the same house.
The pride of manhood warned him against this woman who was rich and the
daughter of the man from whom he received a salary.
Maxine knew nothing of the pride of manhood; she only knew that he avoided
her.
She was dressed entirely in white with a row of pearls for her only
ornament. She had just returned from some social function, and Adams as he
rose to meet her noticed that she had closed the door.
"Dr. Adams," said the girl, "forgive me for disturbing you at this hour.
For days I have wished to speak to you about my father. I have put it off,
but I feel I must speak--what has happened to him?"
She took a seat in an armchair, and Adams stood before her with his back
to the mantelpiece and his hands behind him.
The big man did not answer for a moment. He stood there like a statue,
looking at his questioner gravely and contemplatively, as a physician
looks at a patient whose case is not quite clear.
Then he said, "You notice a change in your father?"
"No," said Maxine, "it is more than a change. He is quite different--he is
another man."
"When we were hunting out there," said Adams, "Captain Berselius had an
accident. In trying to rescue a servant he was caught by an elephant and
flung some distance; he hurt his head, and when he recovered consciousness
his memory was quite gone. It slowly returned----" He paused, for it was
impossible to give details, then he went on--"I noticed, myself, as the
memory was returning, that he seemed changed; when he had fully recovered
his memory, the fact was obvious. He was, as you say, quite different--in
fact, just as you see him now."
"But can an injury change a person like that?"
"Yes; an injury to the head can change a person completely."
Maxine sighed. She had never seen the dark side of her father; she had
never loved him in the true sense of the word, but she had respected him
and felt a pride in his strength and dominance.
The man who had returned from Africa seemed to her an inferior being; the
wreck, in fact, of the man she had always known.
"And this happened to him," said she, "when he was trying to save a
servant's life?"
"Ah," said Adams, "if you could have seen it, you would have called it
something even higher than that--it was a sublime act."
He told her the details, even as he had told them to Schaunard, but with
additions.
"I myself was paralyzed--I could only cling to the tree and watch. The
fury of that storm of beasts coming down on one was like a wind--I can put
it no other way--like a wind that stripped one's mind of everything but
just the power of sight. I can imagine now the last day, when the sun
shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. It was as bad as
that--well, _he_ did not lose his mind or nerve, he found time to think of
the man who was lying drugged with hemp, and he found courage enough in
his heart to attempt to save him. He was fond of the man, for the man was
a great hunter though an absolute savage, without heart or soul.
"Without heart or soul----" Adams paused. There was something about Maxine
Berselius that made her different from the ordinary woman one meets in
life--some inheritance from her father, perhaps, who knows? But through
the sweetness of her nature which spoke in voice and expression, through
her loveliness and her womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like
the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of
Maxine's pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled,
now shining forth. It was the light of that flame which men call
originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams,
though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the
light of other people's lamps.
The Hostage House of Yandjali would have told Maxine infinitely more than
it told Adams. She would have read in Meeus's face a story that he never
deciphered; she would have seen in the people of the Silent Pools a whole
nation in chains, when he with his other-people-begotten ideas of niggers
and labour only saw a few recalcitrant blacks. It wanted skulls and bones
to bring him to a sense of the sorrow around him; the sight of these
people would have told Maxine of their tears.
This instinct for the truth of things made her a reader of people. Adams
had interested her at first sight, because she found him difficult to
read. She had never met a man like him before; he belonged to a different
race. The man in him appealed powerfully to the woman in her; they were
physical affinities. She had told him this in a hundred ways half
unconsciously and without speech before they parted at Marseilles, but the
mind in him had not appealed to the mind in her. She did not know his
mind, its stature or its bent, and until that knowledge came to her she
could not love him.
As he stood with his back to the fireplace after that pronouncement on the
spiritual and moral condition of the Zappo Zap, his thoughts strayed for a
moment with a waft of the wing right across the world to the camping place
by the great tree. Out there now, under the stars, the tree and the pool
were lying just as he had seen them last. Away to the east the burst
elephant gun was resting just where it had been dropped; the bones of the
giraffe, clean-picked and white, were lying just where the gun had laid
them; and the bones of the man who had held the gun were lying just where
the leopards had left him.
Adams knew nothing of this triangle drawn by death; he still fancied the
Zappo Zap alive and deadly. Stirred into speech by that thought he went
on:
"A cannibal--a creature worse than a tiger--that was the being for whom
your father risked his life."
"A cannibal?" said Maxine, opening her eyes wide.
"Yes; a soldier of the Government who was detailed to act as our guide."
"A soldier--but what Government employs cannibals as soldiers?"
"Oh," said Adams, "they call them soldiers, that is just a name. Slave
drivers is the real name, but the Government that employs them does not
use the word slave--oh, no, everyone would be shocked--_scoundrels_!"
He spoke the word with suddenly flashing eyes, uplifted head, and a face
as stern the face of Themis. He seemed for a moment fronting some
invisible foe, then, smothering his wrath, he went on:
"I lose control of myself when I think of what I have seen--the suffering,
the misery, and the wretchedness. I saw enough at first to have made me
open my eyes, but the thing was not shown to me really till I saw the
bones of murdered people--people whom I had seen walking about
alive--lying there a few weeks later, just skeletons; a little child I had
talked to and played with----"
He stopped and turned to the fireplace and rested his elbow on the mantel.
He had turned his back on Maxine, and volumes could not have said more
than what was expressed by that abrupt stoppage of speech and turning
away.
The girl scarcely breathed till the man turned from the mantelpiece and
faced her again. There was no trace of emotion on his face, but the trace
of a struggle with it. Maxine's eyes were filled with tears.
"I am sorry," said he, "that I should have dragged this subject before you
at all. Why should I torment your heart as well as my own?"
She did not reply for a moment. She was tracing the vague pattern of the
carpet with her eyes, her chin resting on her hand, and the light from
above made a halo of the burnished red-gold hair that was her crowning
charm.
Then she said, speaking slowly, "I am not sorry. Surely if such things
are, they ought to be known. Why should I turn away my face from
suffering? I have never done so in Paris, and I have seen much of the
misery of Paris, for I have gone amongst it as much as a girl can, but
what you tell me is beyond what I have ever heard of, or read of, or
dreamed. Tell me more, give me facts; for, frankly, though I believe you,
I cannot yet fully realize, and with my mind fully believe. I am like
Thomas; I must put my fingers in the wounds."
"Are you brave enough to look at material evidence?" asked Adams.
"Yes; brave enough to face the suffering of others if not my own----"
He left the room and in a few minutes later returned with a parcel. He
took from it the skull he had brought with him through everything to
civilization.
Maxine's eyes dilated when she saw the thing, but she did not turn pale,
and she looked steadfastly at it as Adams turned it in his hands and
showed her by the _foramen magnum_ the hacks in the bone caused by the
knife.
She put out her finger and touched them, then she said, "I believe."
Adams put the skull on the table; curious and small and ferocious and
repellent it looked. One would never have imagined the black face, the
grin, and the rolling eyes of the creature to whom it had once belonged.
One thing only about it touched the heart with sadness--its size.
"It is a child's," said Maxine.
"Yes; the child I told you of--all that remains of it."
He was about to wrap the thing up again when the girl interposed.
"Let it lie there whilst you tell me; it will bring things nearer to me. I
am not afraid of it--poor, poor creature. Tell me all you know--tell me
the worst. I am not a young lady for the moment, please, just a person
listening."
He took his seat in an armchair opposite to her, and resting his elbows on
his knees, talking just as if he were talking to a man, found the words he
could not find when, pen in hand, half an hour ago, he had tried to
express himself in writing.
He told of the Hostage House at Yandjali, and the wretched creatures
penned like animals eating their miserable food; he told of M'Bassa and
the Hostage House there, with its iron rings and chains; he told how all
over that vast country these places were dotted, not by the hundred but by
the thousand; he told of the misery of the men who were driven into the
dismal forests, slaves of masters worse than tigers, and of a task that
would never end as long as rubber grew and Christ was a name in Europe and
not a power; he told the awful fact that murder there was used every day
as an agricultural implement, that people were operated upon, and suffered
amputation of limbs, not because of disease; and that their sex and
age--those two last appeals of Nature to brutality--had no voice; he told
the whole bitter tale of tears and blood, but he could not tell her all,
for she was a girl, and it would be hard to speak even before a man of the
crimes against Nature, the crimes against men, against women, and against
children, that even if the Congo State were swept away to-morrow, will
leave Belgium's name in the world's history more detestable than the names
of the unspeakable cities sunk in the Dead Sea.
Maxine listened, entranced, swayed between the terror of the tale and the
power of the man who was telling it.
Ah! if he could have spoken to Europe as he spoke to her; if he could have
made Europe see as he made her see, what a whirlwind of indignation would
have arisen; but he could not.
It was the magnet of her sympathy that marshalled the facts, clad them in
burning language, and led them forth in battalions that stormed her mind
and made her believe what seemed unbelievable. Without that sympathy, his
words would have been cold and lifeless statements bearing little
conviction.
When he had finished, she did that which a woman never does unless moved
by the very highest excitement. She rose up and paced the floor thrice.
Without speaking, she walked the length of the room, then she turned to
Adams.
"But this must cease."
"This shall cease," said he, "if I can only make myself heard.
To-day--to-night--just before you came in, I was trying to put the thing
on paper--trying to put down what I have seen with my own eyes, and heard
with my own ears, but the ink seems ice. What I write seems nothing,
nothing beside what I have seen. The mere statement that so many were
killed, so many were tortured, conveys nothing of the reality. The thing
is too big for me. God made it, I suppose; but I wish to God I had never
seen it."
Maxine was standing now with her hands resting on the back of an armchair.
She seemed scarcely listening to what her companion was saying. She was
listening, but she was thinking as well.
"You cannot do everything yourself," said she, at last. "You must get
others to help, and in this I can, perhaps, assist you. Will you go
to-morrow and see Monsieur Pugin? I do not know him personally, but I know
a friend of his. I will send him a note early to-morrow morning, and the
servant can bring back the letter of introduction. You could call upon him
to-morrow afternoon."
"Who is Monsieur Pugin?"
This question, showing such a boundless ignorance of every-day French life
and literature, rather shocked Maxine. She explained that Ary Pugin, the
author of "Absolution" and twenty other works equally beautiful, was above
all other men fitted to bring home to France the story of this great sin.
"Absolution," that masterpiece, had shown France her cruelty in the
expulsion of the religious orders. France had read it weeping, drying her
tears with one hand and continuing the expulsion of the religious orders
with the other.
That, however, was not Pugin's fault; he had done his best. It was not his
fault that logic and sentiment are so largely constituent of the French
nature, making between them that paradox, the French mind.
"I will go and see him," said Adams, when the girl had explained what
Pugin was, what Pugin did, and what Pugin had written. "A man like that
could do more with a stroke of his pen, than I with weary years of
blundering attempts to write. I can never thank you enough for listening
to me. It is strange, but half the weight of the thing seems to have
passed from my mind."
"To mine," she replied. Then, with charming _naïveté_, she held out both
hands to him.
"Good night."
As he held the door open, and as she passed out, he realized that, during
the last few months, his faith in the goodness of God--the old simple
faith of his childhood--had been all but stolen by ferocious and fiendish
hands from his mind, and that just now, in some miraculous way, it had
been returned.
It was as though the gentle hands of Maxine had put it back.
Maxine, when she reached her own apartments, turned on the electric light
in her sitting room, and sat down at once to write to the friend who was a
friend of Pugin's.
This friend was Sabatier.
She had studied art under him, and between artist and pupil lay that
mysterious bond which unites craftsmen. For Maxine was great in knowledge
and power, and above all in that instinct without which an artist is at
best an animated brush, a pencil under the dominion of mechanical force.
As she wrote, she little dreamed that the sympathy burning in her heart
and moving to eloquence her pen, was a thing born not from the sufferings
of an afflicted people, but of the love of a man. A child of her mind
begotten by the man she had just left, and whom, that night, she had
learned to love.